Archive for August, 2010

500 Hennessy Road is the next mega-mall in Hysan Development portfolio of “works”. It’s been a construction site since we arrived in Causeway Bay in mid 2008. Only recently has it started reaching for the skies.

Word on the street is it will have 11 floors of retail space and 36 floors overall with 4 basement levels. A business pamphlet regaling its awesomeness toots that it will be a green building with green roofs with energy sustaining features lah de dah de dah. Actually they list quite a lot of energy/green measures in their blurb and it takes up about 90% of the information given. Must be feeling the heat from somewhere.

Anyway, it will be done by the end of 2011 and will look like this:

There’s a bit too much blue sky in the artist’s impression. Picture it, if you will, with a dozen more concrete structures surrounding it. You may glimpse a bit of blue sky in between the concrete jungle or reflected of the energy efficient windows. I can only imagine the increase in traffic in the area. Yowsa!

You leave Hong Kong for any amount of time and you will return, without a doubt, to your favorite or handiest store closed and another store in its place .

I was shafted Saturday morning on my way to grab a taxi to soccer by a handy 7-11 I would always get my water and some sort of snack. Only to find it gone, never to be seen again. In its place? Another clothes store named after someone I never heard of.

It can also work the other way though. In the basement of Windsor House (opposite Ikea) where once stood a number of knick knack stores selling silly things now stands a lovely little International Park N Shop food store. A nice new close to home option for us to food shop. Beside it and new also; Fortress (a home appliances/computer store) and Watson’s (a pharmacy Boots type store). Actually Fortress is advertising they will stock the iPhone4 soon…

Windsor House also…houses…a newish cinema. It was there when we left but again it puts the number of cinemas within 10 minutes walking distance from our apartment to 4.

In fairness the exhibitions in Times Square shopping mall are pretty weak but the latest one is pretty cool looking. One of those art exhibitions that make you go “What the hell is going on?” and you just have to take a closer look.

I’m afraid the photos don’t do them justice, they’re created squished and elongated so the eye is totally fooled by walking up close to them and around them (no I haven’t messed up my image resizing!). I was really impressed. And a nice Leon tribute too.

This one isn’t baffling to the eyes it’s just a pretty cool looking goat or something along those lines.

I’m just gonna go ahead and ignore the fact that the last entry on Bonkers was May 9th. Ouch. I was busy alright!

So Summer brings along our mammoth around the world trip visiting both our families in Ireland and America. Traveling by plane is just not fun. It should be but its not. It should be numerous hours with an excuse to pig out, sit on your ass and watch movies and t.v. shows. Unfortunately the way airlines cram us all in and the unwillingness of other people to realize that there are other people in this world strive to make it a living hell. Anyway, it’s miraculous and amazing and I’m happy airplanes exist but where the hell are the transporters all the sci-fi authors lead us to believe would be around in the 00’s..?

Back to reality we spent the first few weeks in Ireland eating, drinking, sleeping and watching soccer on t.v., soccer on the pitch and Gaelic football.

My county (Louth) were playing in a provincial final. It was all going swimmingly until a last-minute (illegal) goal from County Meath won the final for them. Cue pitch invasion and referee thumping. We got out of there quick-time.

We watched Dundalk in our first European tie in our home ground for donkey’s years and win!

And of course we watched the World Cup wind down.

In between all that we enjoyed mum’s hospitality and cooking and spent the days petting cats and Molly, the friendly neighborhood dog!

I appreciate the scenery around home more each time I get home.

Cleveland time! We spent the final few weeks in Cleveland doing pretty much the same thing (replace soccer with baseball). Enjoying our other mum’s cooking and hospitality!
Took in a few Indians games and ate some great food and took a few lessons in golf from my bro-in-law.

This was A-Rod’s attempt at HR 600 hence all the cameras going off. He left Cleveland without doing it. Which was nice. He reached it a few weeks later in NY.

A good business model I came across was this Irish Barber. Seán came over from Derry during the troubles and stayed around. He got himself a liquor license so thirsty customers can wait in the bar in the next room to wait for their turn. He’s the only guy in Cleveland who knows how to pour a good pint of Guinness and the quality is great. Recommended!

Before we knew it the long haul trip back to Honkers was upon us. 15 hours and 15 minutes on a plane is not the nicest way to finish off a relaxing holiday. But we’re back and I’ll try to keep this blog updated, I got a couple of posts to do in the works Honkers related so will work on that as soon as possible. Don’t want to let down the 50 subscribers on Google Reader down!